Evening Brief: Monday, April 4, 2016

Tonight’s Evening Brief is brought to you by Rivermead Golf Club. Rivermead offers a range of flexible membership categories to fit a variety of lifestyles, no initiation fees, a relaxed, welcoming atmosphere and a convenient location less than 10km from downtown. There has never been a better time to join a private golf club.

As he promised after his election defeat in October, former finance minister Joe Oliver is not retiring to a quiet life of pigeon-feeding. Oliver has been appointed chairman of the advisory board at Origin Merchant Partners, a Toronto-based independent investment bank, the firm announced in a Monday. Our BJ Siekierski has the details.

Roughly half of Fentanyl patch prescriptions aren’t safe for patients, even though prescriptions have become generally safer over the past decade, according to a new study from the University of Manitoba. Our Kyle Duggan has the rest.

Brexit campaigners who say Commonwealth ties can replace links with the European Union offer voters a false choice ahead of Britain’s June 23 EU referendum, Patricia Scotland, the new Commonwealth Secretary-General, said today. Scotland, a former Labour cabinet minister, made the statements following her inauguration ceremony in London. With Scotland’s accession, the two major non-UN multilateral groups — the Commonwealth and La Francophonie — are now headed by black women. Former Canadian Governor General Michaëlle Jean was elected head of La Francophonie in November, 2014.

A London School of Economics study shows climate change could cut the value of the world’s financial assets by $2.5tn, according to the first estimate from economic modelling. In the worst case scenarios, often used by regulators to check the financial health of companies and economies, the losses could soar to $24tn, or 17 per cent of the world’s entire assets, and wreck the global economy.